Yes, I forgot to mention that, it comes with a new app called “files”.
That’s interesting.
File access was always possible, using some 3rd party apps, via USB e.g. Iphone Explorer. But (a) it was very limited and (b) Apple used deliberately obscure directory naming (like Symbian) which makes it hard to find one’s way around. However Iphone Explorer was quite handy for hacking some aviation app subscriptions 
Let’s say somebody emails you an mp3 or a pdf. Can “files” access the file and enable you to move it to say a USB flash device, or re-email it out? How does IOS get around the sandboxed architecture?
Ctrl-Alt-Delete isn’t quite as silly as Gates might think (by the time Gates said this, he had long ago stopped dealing with the technical side), but it is still an odd choice.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete on the modern “VMS” * based Windows is the “secure attention sequence”, basically it’s a keystroke that is not used anywhere else, so normally normal desktop or command line programs cannot see it, the kernel traps it before it ever gets there – so you can see why it shouldn’t be a single key because it would mean that key would not be usable for any normal program – and it had to work with the keyboards that existed when NT came out which wouldn’t have had a new, dedicated login key. Up to Windows XP, it went to something called the GINA and brought up the login window or the lock screen window, which was effectively in a completely separate desktop. This was to prevent someone running an application that looked like a login window to harvest usernames and passwords, because when the user hit Ctrl-Alt-Del it would bring up the real login window on a separate desktop. (It was in reality a bit pointless: and probably why they moved away from it; anyone with physical access to the hardware could just replace the GINA DLL with their own which recorded usernames and passwords, and there were also ways to intercept the SAS from a normal desktop app too, and IIRC they could be done with normal user privileges! So like many Microsoft things, they had a good idea but the implementation was flawed to the extent it completely negated this idea). There were other possible SAS too, such as a smart card insertion.
Another issue with Ctrl-Alt-Del was during the crossover period when quite often an organisation would have a mix of NT based systems and DOS based systems running a DOS-extender Windows (a period which lasted years) Ctrl-Alt-Del on one computer (running an NT derivative, e.g. NT or Win2K) would bring up the login screen (or the lock window if you were already logged on), and on the next computer running DOS-extender Windows (e.g. 95, 98, ME) it would reboot the computer. Inadvertent reboots and data loss were common and annoying.
* I’m trolling. NT’s original designer was also the designer of VAX/VMS.
I like the term “DOS extender windows” 
Now, if you were more senior, you would remember Windows 2, Windows 3, Windows 286, Windows 386… and Digital Research’s GEM (which Alan Sugar went for because it made a computa’ look like an Apple Mac All these loaded DOS first, so you had a real computa’ underneath it. But these were all great tools which revolutionalised productivity like not much else since.
I never used GEM, but I did use Amiga Workbench a small amount, and RISC OS, and Windows 3, and Windows for Playgroups, err. I mean Workgroups. And some others like Sun’s Openlook (which I really liked at the time, and was open sourced early on so I could run it on my Linux system back in 1993. CDE was a step backwards compared to Openlook). I am as it happens a bit of a nerd. I think I wrote my first asm instructions for Z80 at age 12 :-)
Out of all of them RISC OS was probably the nicest to use. It also was ahead of its time, for instance it dropped the "long complicated question that will probably destroy all your data and it’s not clear whether it’s “Yes” that’s the option that destroys data or “No” that destroys your data, [yes] [no]" style dialogue for “Such and such might happen happen – [Destroy data] [Don’t destroy data]” which has become the common modern way to do dialoges – RISC OS was using this style by the early 90s, and also it had things like anti-aliased fonts long before Windows or Mac OS got them. Also the Acorn Axxxx machines were also about a million times faster than the PCs of the time. I remember running a DOS emulator at school on an Acorn A3xxx system that actually emulated a PC in software faster than a lot of the actual real hardware ran (at the time there were still a lot of 8088 and 80286 systems being sold, the 386 was still pretty expensive).
EuroFlyer wrote:
Many years ago a threw all windows related computers (pardon: PCs) out of the window and never regretted it a second.
At home I did that around 1995. Just Macintosh ever since. I used to work a lot on computers in my engineering/IT days (rather: decades) and just wanted to be spared from all the associated hassle at home. Turn the thing on, do my stuff and turn it off again. Like a TV or washing machine. To this day a Macintosh is the only computer which will deliver that. At normal usage it will last for ten years at least and will still be able to run current stuff. This is all I need.
An iPhone like that would be my dream but the real thing is not like this unfortunately. Mainly because they force you to install update after update (just like Windows…) until the hardware can’t cope with it any longer. Thereby they force you to buy a new one every two or three years which is something I just refuse to do. Therefore, privately I have now my second Samsung phone, the first one lasted 7 or 8 years. I guess my current one will last just as long. And the battery needs charging twice per week at most, other than my company iPhone which won’t last a single day without a recharge. For that reason alone I will never buy an iPhone for myself.
The iPad on the other hand is something I don’t want to live without any more. A wonderful device in every respect. Long-living (mine will be 6 years old soon), good battery life, good everything. If it ever breaks I will replace it immediately with another iPad. My big dream however would be a 14- or 15-inch iPad which runs not iOS but MacOS and which, in one single device, would replace both the tablet and the computer. But they will never make one for obvious reasons…
Considered the Mac switch about 15 years ago.
Software in the industry was all on M$ so I was forced to keep a Win box.
Don’t like that Apple collects information all the time.
One can go as deep into Android as they please (FOSS, mainly) and block/turn off anything they want.
The future of the world is information and your identity and personal information will become more and more valuable in the future.
Privacy was a right, is now a privilege and will soon be a luxury.
Don’t forget that nothing gets deleted. It just ‘disappears’ from your view… ;)
That’s the (IMHO) real value proposition of an Android phone… real control = real privacy (if you know how to use it).
iOS 11 runs fine on every iPhone from the 2013 iPhone 5S. Which does not mean you cannot run most existing apps on 10.3 for years to come. For example the iPad mini 1 with iOS 9.x runs almost everything you will want today.
I sell my iPhones always after 2 years and for at least 50% of the original price, so it’s really not that expensive to upgrade to the latest model. For aviation standards it’s cheap fun anyway ….
what_next wrote:
My big dream however would be a 14- or 15-inch iPad which runs not iOS but MacOS and which, in one single device, would replace both the tablet and the computer. But they will never make one for obvious reasons…
Who needs to wait for Apple to do this…
My iPad mini 1 really struggles now. The guys at EASYVFR told me that it can’t cope and I should consider replacing it.
